


Can't Let It Go

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Adoption, Drama, F/M, Families of Choice, Flashpoint - Freeform, Flashpoint AU, Flashpoint Batman, Flashpoint Joker, Gen, Orphans, Unconventional Families, and then someone was like:, angst but really surprisingly little for a trashfire tragedy, because in that canon timeline they're married, because it was spawned by the immolation of spacetime, but like, but what if not, dick helps, i know flashpoint is mechanically required to be As Worst As Possible, she's the Joker, so technically Batman/Joker, suboptimal treatment of bats, that's to be expected, this marriage is a disaster of course, what if found family?, what if thomas was an okay batman?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21876301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: “You’re different lately,” said Martha, a few months after the Grayson-Zucco case wrapped up. This was only the third time they’d seen each other and the second time they’d fought in that time, but Thomas knew she kept eyes on him.It was a lot easier than the reverse, considering he still lived under his own name in their former mutual residence.“It’s the boy, isn’t it?” she asked. "The one from the circus.”
Relationships: Martha Wayne/Thomas Wayne, Thomas Wayne & Dick Grayson
Comments: 19
Kudos: 169





	Can't Let It Go

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired directly by [this post](https://drakefeathers.tumblr.com/post/187868258036/omg-like-bruce-adopts-children-thomas-more). (Op's blog theme is confusing; the original post is in the middle, then read up, and finally read the bit at the bottom.) 
> 
> Story and chapter titles from the song by the Goo Goo Dolls.
> 
> 😆 I'm salty about King's using Thomas!Batman as a villain in the run that just wrapped up without bothering to motivate him properly btw, on top of having been salty about characterization decisions since the original Flashpoint.

They met when Batman grabbed Dick out of midair and pinned him against a wall. “What do you think you’re—oh. You’re the Grayson boy. I see.”

“If you see then let me go!”

“I think not.” Batman resettled himself so Dick was more comfortable, but didn’t let him away from the wall. “I can only think of a few reasons you’d be backflipping through this neighborhood clutching your stomach.” And then his large hand was in Dick’s hoodie pocket, and Dick grabbed back and wouldn’t let go. “Give me the gun, Richard. You don’t want to use it.”

“Why not? You do!”

“Only as a last resort.”

“Well you’re a big guy who pins people to walls! I’m little!”

“…a good point, but too narrow in scope.” Everyone knew about the Batman, of course. He’d been a Gotham legend for almost twenty years, and unlike say the Jersey Devil or Mothman he _actually existed,_ which made him much more interesting to outsiders. “How will it help you, to die shooting people?”

“My parents will be avenged.” _Obviously._ Dick gave another attempt at a struggle. He was strong and bendy but Batman was like a second wall.

Batman sighed. “That’s a Joker sort of answer,” he said, and then before Dick could worry that meant the masked man thought _he_ needed shooting, continued, “It assumes its own consequent. Listen, son. You shouldn’t kill, and you shouldn’t die. Both of those will make this tragedy worse. Believe me, it’s the last thing your parents would have wanted.”

“You didn’t even know them.”

“I used to be a father myself.”

Dick flinched away from the sudden open well of pain, too much like his own, but he stopped fighting. “You should’ve taken care of Zucco before he could do this,” he muttered.

“I should have. I apologize.” Batman adjusted his grip again to let Dick’s feet slide to the floor. “I promise it will be done within three days.”

“Let me help.” It tore out of him, and Batman froze. “If you don’t I’ll just come back, even if you take the gun I’ll try anyway with whatever I can find. The Child Welfare people can’t hold me. And I can’t live like this, I have to _do_ something.”

“Richard…”

“Dick.”

“Ah. Dick, this isn’t something you should be exposed to. I’m not necessarily planning to kill anyone, but the violence—”

“I _already saw my parents broken on the ground,_ ” Dick spat.

Batman drew back, and he wasn’t pinned anymore. “Alright,” he said. “Alright. You can help. But you have to be _careful_.”

* * *

Afterward, Batman returned him to Child Welfare. Nobody _was_ dead, except maybe one guy who’d fallen off a roof, and Dick was going to be needed to give testimony at the trial. Batman didn’t give his gun back. He hesitated, while dropping Dick off. “Are you going to be okay?”

Dick shrugged. “They won’t let me go home,” he said. “They’re trying to call some of Mom’s cousins in Europe to see if they’ll take me, but probably I’ll just get put somewhere.” He was indifferent to the future, for now. Maybe that would change later, when the past was a little more resolved. He looked up, as Batman leapt onto a dumpster to give himself the height to make the roof. “How come?” he asked.

Everyone knew Batman was protective of victims, especially children. He wasn’t exactly subtle about it. But this had felt like more than that.

Batman said, “You’re the same age my son was.”

* * *

Batman came to the trial. Without that, without the context, maybe Dick wouldn’t have known him, though he thought he still would have, but his eye caught on the tall man with the black and silver hair as he sat down in one row of the audience, and the way his shoulders squared themselves toward the accused like he might have to start hitting him again, the way his head and eyebrow tilted when he looked toward Dick and saw him looking back…

He leaned toward the woman on his right, a pizza delivery lady who’d seen some important incriminating stuff. “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing even though it was rude.

She twisted agreeably to check. “Hm? Oh. I don’t know, he does look sort of familiar though. Maybe an actor?”

As it turned out, Batman was a doctor.

“Thank you,” Dick said when he came up to him after the trial. To let Batman know he knew.

He acknowledged it with only another tip of his eyebrows. He had a very expressive face, when it wasn’t under the mask. “I saw the group home,” Batman said, in a tone that meant _it isn’t good_.

It wasn’t, but Dick was surviving. “It’s just until a place opens up somewhere else,” he said. Somewhere, if he was _lucky_ , with nice people who wanted him to treat them like parents.

Batman nodded, but abstractedly, not like he was really agreeing. “I have a foster license,” he said. “If you’d like. You can stay with me as long as you want to.”

Of all things, Dick had not been expecting that.

“I won’t be around very much,” Batman said. “I’m always working. Usually I take older kids, just in passing. But if you—”

“Why?” Dick interrupted. “Because I figured it out?”

“No.” Batman was very firm. “No, that was a surprise. I’d been agonizing over whether I should tell you.” A grin, self-mocking, split his face, and was gone. “I told you, you remind me of my son. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking—if we’d been the ones who died, instead of him. At least he’d still have had the house.”

Dick didn’t think they let orphans stay alone even if they had houses to do it in, but maybe there was family that could have moved in, or maybe he even just meant the house could have been turned into money, which always made things easier. “Okay,” he said, and then, “wait, I don’t even know your name.”

Batman looked startled by that, then embarrassed, and then he smiled. He had a face that looked like it was made for smiles, but also like it didn’t wear them very much. Dick was circus, he knew these things. He put out his big hand. “Thomas Wayne.”

Dick took it. There were no calluses at all. “Dick Grayson.” He found a smile of his own, from the space deep inside where they’d been locked away since Mom and Dad. “Pleasure working with you.”

That made Batman laugh, and though he stopped, almost guiltily, after a second, it was a nice laugh. Dick thought he’d try to get him to do it again.

* * *

“You’re different lately,” said Martha, a few months after the Grayson-Zucco case wrapped up. This was only the third time they’d seen each other and the second time they’d fought in that time, but he knew she kept eyes on him. It was a lot easier than the reverse, considering he still lived under his own name in their former mutual residence.

He ignored her, because that was usually safest and because he had to focus on ducking under a punch. Joker was faster than he was, and he was a big target. If she ever really tried to kill him, he didn’t think much of his chances. He’d had decades of practice now, but so had she. “It’s the boy, isn’t it?” she asked. He made a grab for her right wrist and she turned out to have a knife in her left. If he hadn’t had armor it could have been nasty. “The one from the Circus.” They scrabbled briefly, then broke apart, circled.

Beneath the gantry, her latest madness operation was falling apart. Thomas had released a small amount of that terror gas the new boy, Crane, had come up with, and a whole crowd of bats, who were flying everywhere in great distress from all the lights and noise, while Martha’s clowns fell over one another in terror, smashing equipment.

Animal cruelty, probably, but finding selfishly advantageous moments to release bats into the wild wasn’t _worse_ than killing everyone here but Martha, or letting her go ahead with another mass poisoning.

“You’re losing your _edge_ ,” his wife crooned, tossing a hammer from one hand to the other—disconcertingly an ordinary claw-backed carpentry hammer, rather than one of the more usual mallets. She didn’t care about the chaos unfolding underfoot. Possibly enjoyed it.

Her face twisted suddenly, as it did, into the shape that made space only for madness and loathing and did not show any trace of his Martha under the paint. “Did you _replace_ our boy?” she demanded. And suddenly the hammer was gone and knives were flying.

Thomas fell back. “No.”

“You did! You found another little boy to take home and put in his bed and now you’re _healing!_ ” They almost never talked about Bruce. Only rarely acknowledged aloud what they had been to each other. Never, ever said his name, even when they met by chance before his grave. “How dare you! HOW DARE YOU!”

Her assault fell apart as her rage peaked, calculation and mad cunning both failing, and the second time her fist landed uselessly on his cuirass Thomas was able to catch it.

“It’s not like that,” he said, snatching for the other wrist. Not that having her by both wrists was a guarantee of anything, but it did lower the odds of stabbing. “It’s not.” He’d been telling her for twenty years they needed to try to recover, to move on with their lives at least a little, but he’d only been a little better at it than her and she had always made sure to rip open his scars and keep herself an open wound. So maybe she had reason not to believe him.

“He’s not a replacement. He never could be. He’s just—he understands it from the other side, Martha. If it had been Bruce who lived instead, wouldn’t you have wanted someone—”

It worked, sometimes, talking to her like she was still who she used to be. Especially when she started it by bringing up the past. But he should have known better than to use that name. It earned him a headbutt to the chin, timed carefully to make sure he bit the end of his tongue.

“You’re letting him die,” she accused. “You stupid, awful man, you’re letting him _go._ ”

 _He’s already dead,_ Thomas didn’t say, mouth full of the taste of blood. _He’s been dead so much longer than he ever got the chance to live_.

“Never,” he said. “I’m doing this _for_ him. We talked about this the first time, when I started fostering.” He wasn’t going to pretend Dick wasn’t different, that he wasn’t more attached and potentially permanent and just, generally, not the _same_ as the teenagers who’d found safe harbor in the Manor before. But that hadn’t changed. “It’s all for him.”

There were a possibly ludicrous number of public institutions and amenities called the Bruce Wayne Memorial Something in Gotham at this point. Part of it was an honest desire for the city never to forget his son who had died before he could make his own mark, but also the Joker never touched any of them. It was the best protection he could give. A dead child's name as apotropaic charm. Ghastly.

“You know that.” Even if they disagreed wildly about what was an appropriate response to anything and what Bruce would have wanted, even as she raged, Martha usually admitted Thomas _cared_ , even if she thought he did it badly.

Bruce would be twenty-eight if he’d lived. Barely old enough to have a son Dick’s age. “Can’t you think of it more as a sort of grandchild?” Thomas asked. A little desperate. If the Joker went after Dick, because of _him_...

She blinked, the twist fallen off her features enough that it was so plainly _Martha_ there, under everything, and it made his heart ache just like always. Then she grinned that grin that was not quite her own again. “Building’s on fire,” she announced, as though this was a personal achievement.

Beneath their feet, the panicking Joker gang had mostly found their way to exits, and he turned and smashed out all the windows near the ceiling, following the bolas with tiny sonic devices that would lead the bats to safety. They made their way out in a plume like the smoke that came with them, and Martha, with a mocking wave, dove after them.

Thomas left through a different window, and called the fire department.

**Author's Note:**

> In high school I directed a very basic student production of _Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?_ and now I always look at the Flashpoint Batman and Joker and shake my head and go: "Thomas and Martha, sad sad sad."
> 
> Headcanon Thomas avoids punching as Batman as much as he can, even when he's having a very violent day, because he's a surgeon and he doesn't actually want to mess up his hands.


End file.
